[14] The American Trotskyist David North said that this was an assumption based on Trotsky's Jewish birth, but, contrary to Service's claims, there is no documentary evidence to support his using a Yiddish name, when that language was not spoken by his family.

Despite his capabilities in the engineering department, he quickly grew bored of his studies and began to spend more time reading books on political philosophy and participating in underground revolutionary activities.

[65] In October 1908 he was asked to join the editorial staff of Pravda ("Truth"), a bi-weekly, Russian-language social democratic paper for Russian workers, which he co-edited with Adolph Joffe and Matvey Skobelev.

[80] Trotsky sided with Lenin against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed staging an armed uprising, and he led the efforts to overthrow the Russian Provisional Government headed by socialist Aleksandr Kerensky.

After the Bolsheviks came to power, Trotsky became the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and published the secret treaties previously signed by the Triple Entente that detailed plans for post-war reallocation of colonies and redrawing state borders.

For this reason we were obliged to delay the negotiations as long as possible to give the European workman time to understand the main fact of the Soviet revolution itself and particularly its peace policy.

"However, even though Lenin was in favor of a peace, due to party opposition, he responded with these messages from 18 January 1918:[96] "Stalin has just arrived; we will look into the matter with him and let you have a joint answer right away," and "please adjourn proceedings and leave for Petrograd.

[99] Privately, in correspondence with Count Otto von Czernin, Trotsky had expressed his willigness to relent to peace terms upon the resumption of a German offensive although with moral dissent.

So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear.

He despised "bourgeois democracy"; he believed that spinelessness and soft-heartedness would destroy the revolution, and that the suppression of the propertied classes and political opponents would clear the historical arena for socialism.

Although the exact sequence of events is unclear, evidence suggests that at first the troika nominated Trotsky to head second-rate government departments (e.g., Gokhran, the State Depository for Valuables).

The United Opposition was repeatedly threatened with sanctions by the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party, and Trotsky had to agree to tactical retreats, mostly to preserve his alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev.

[170][171] On the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, the Opposition held a street demonstration in Moscow against Stalin's Government, that was dispersed by the sovietic authorities and Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party shortly after.

Answering Trotsky's request, the French mathematician and Trotskyist Jean Van Heijenoort, together with his fellow activist Pierre Frank, unsuccessfully called on the influential Soviet author Maxim Gorky to intervene in favor of Christian Rakovsky, and boarded the ship he was traveling on near Constantinople.

[205] While in Mexico, Trotsky worked with André Breton and Diego Rivera to write the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, published in 1938, which emphasized the need for artistic freedom outside the constraints of capitalist and Stalinist regimes.

[214]After a failed attempt to have Trotsky murdered in March 1939, Stalin assigned the overall organization of implementing the task to the NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov, who, in turn, co-opted Nahum Eitingon.

The moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head.

[239] His personal secretary and later a historian of mathematical logic, Jean van Heijenoort, considered him to be amicable, inquisitive and occasionally charming with new acquaintances during his final years in Mexico.

[240] Historian Dmitri Volkogonov characterised him as a "vivid, complex, multi-faceted personality in the gallery of world figures" who was remembered "with hatred and respect, anger and admiration" decades after his assassination in Mexico.

[242] Biographer Robert Service commented that he was a "volatile and untrustworthy",[233] "arrogant individual"[233] that impressed supporters even during the periods of "personal adversity in the 1920s and 1930s"[233] but failed to "coax and encourage them to the full".

[233] Service stated that Trotsky gave the "minimum time to the Jewish question" and believed that "he ceased to be a Jew in any important sense because Marxism had burned out the fortuitous residues of his origins".

[268] Biographer Joshua Rubenstein differed in his interpretation and attributed Trotsky's decision to decline Lenin's proposal because he believed the position had "little authority of its own" and overlapped with other government and party officials.

[286] Le Blanc has disputed Swain's representation of Trotsky and referenced various historians which included E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Moshe Lewin, Ronald Suny and W. Bruce Lincoln across different generations.

According to Le Blanc, these historians on balance had tilted "toward the view that Lenin's desired "heir" was collective responsibility in which Trotsky placed an important role and within which Stalin would be dramatically demoted (if not removed)".

[299][300] According to Mccauley, Lenin had revealed that he planned to retire to the Central Committee and made an arrangement for Trotsky to speak on his behalf as his natural successor which in turn triggered the formation of the troika.

Trotsky explained his decision to decline the proposed position of Lenin's chief deputy due to concerns about his "Jewish origins" which could accentuate anti-semitic attitudes towards the Soviet Union.

[316] In 2018, John Kelly wrote that "almost 80 years after Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International, there are now Trotskyite organisations in 57 countries, including most of Western Europe and Latin America".

Høgsbjerg stressed the key role of British Trotskyists in various movements such as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (1966–71), the Anti-Nazi League (1977–81), the Anti Poll Tax Federation (1989–91) and the Stop the War Coalition (2001).

[332] By 1917, Bolshevik figures such as Anatoly Lunacharsky, Moisei Uritsky and Dmitry Manuilsky held him in comparable stature with Lenin; with the October insurrection having been carried through in accordance with Trotsky's plan of action.

[388] According to his biographer, Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky explicitly supported revolution through proletarian internationalism but was opposed to achieving this via military conquest with documented references made to his personal opposition to the war with Poland in 1920, proposed armistice with the Entente and temperance with staging anti-British revolts in the Middle East.